Value Inquiry and Constructing the Good in Organizations

Abstract

Research has taken important steps towards establishing values work in organizations as a performative phenomenon situated in practice. Yet, researchers have said little about the critical and creative nature of such work, including how it may build its agentic powers more so from what is ethically absent than from what is established. We approach this void by drawing from Dewey’s Pragmatism in a comparative analysis of how three value-laden issues tied to companionate love are handled in a faith-based hospital. We develop the notion of value inquiry, which we understand as a discovery-oriented and transformative constructing of the good that takes its originating creative desires from troublesome situations. Our findings suggest that ethically fruitful value inquiry involves opening such situations in a way that critically examines previous practice, enlists people in co-defining needs and engages them in sustained experimental action. By theorizing value inquiry, we relocate ethical agency as a responsive relational capacity emerging with coactive power in evolving situations. Such emergence highlights the relational processes of work on values in organizations. When inquiring together, people move beyond attending to the use of prescriptive value conceptions and into a creative mode of actively searching for and co-constructing the good.